Tubetwang wrote:you've got to get a grip and think 2008...
Build amps for rap/hiphop and they will sell...
Amps have to be dance-music-approved.
You mean we need to think a zillion watts "Class D" to a boomy sounding subwoofer, drum machines and turntables?
I try to be politically correct but there's just something wrong with some skinny white guy trying to be M&M or something. My neighbor's daughter's stupid boyfriend drives a Neon with plastic taped over the missing back window, the car is JUNK, it's full of dents from people dancing on it at raves, it's on bald tires and it has an overheating problem. Boyfriend heard I'm a tech so he wants me to build a speaker box for the back to make his hideously unbalanced system more unbalanced. Every time he rolls into the driveway next door with that boomy-boom-boom kill cops crap cranked up I just want to KICK his bony ass!
On to amp building. The trick is to get your parts cost as low as possible, to accomplish that you need to build as much as possible in-house then source the rest in quantity at wholesale. What you're up against is companies like Epiphone offering "a boutique amp unheard of at this price point". Price point, yes, boutique, absolutely NOT.
Let's turn to marketing. It's all about the hype. It would be nice to buy "the tone I have in my head" the first time through, even if I bought Dumble or a Komet to begin with I'd actually save money. How can that be, you ask? Say I spend a thousand dollars a year on gear for twenty or thirty years... which I have. When I think about it I was looking for tone in all the wrong places especially considering the heavy toneless guitars and the tinny solid state amps I now have in storage. I spent the money I could afford at the time for the gear that was available, had I gone for the good stuff to begin with I could have easily banked $20k. It's all a learning process, though. The tones that don't work just affirm that the tones that DO work are the real thing. I could kick myself when I think about the great vintage guitars I've had and sold just because they didn't work with my rig at the moment.
Back to amps. We all like formulas, here's a simple one. Consider how much you need to make a year, divide that by the net profit from each amp to figure out how many amps you need to build to get by. Then step into the challenge of actually selling that many amps per year. It's necessary to have a well rounded skill set because any errors in concept, execution and marketing come straight out of your bottom line, screw up and there's a glitch in your cash flow. No money in means no amps out. No amps out means pissed off customers, pissed off customers means you might as well cross "amp building" off your list of career choices. There's little room for error. The boutique amp community is a small and a tight community. Get it right (Randall Smith) and they'll hate you. Get it wrong and they'll burn you at the stake! (so to speak.)
. Seriously I think it's really hard to even make a profit let alone a living building amps.
